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It's 4:19AM and I'm awake because I made the mistake of taking a nap earlier. Shouldn't have done that. No sir-ee bob. I've been very restless lately. I feel like I need to be productive at all times. It was my day off, so I repurposed an old laptop yesterday. It had an Unbuntu install on it from around 2019 and I wasn't sure exactly what was on it. Turns out, the music collection I had been lamenting as "gone" was in there. Everything from 2008 to around 2021-- just hanging out on this old laptop. I thought I'd lost it years ago when I killed my main desktop PC to save my uncles work computer. I suppose it's not ~dead~ perse. It just needs a power supply and I'm not buying one. Still, I backed it all up, loaded that music onto my phone, and am glad I did.

I swapped out Ubuntu for clean Mint install. I could have updated Ubuntu and installed Cinnamon, but I decided against that because of this. The laptop is a Gateway from 2012. It ran a six year old version of Ubuntu just fine, but I was initially sceptical that it could handle Mint with Cinnamon. Somewhat surprisingly, it runs wonderfully. When I looked at the specs, the machine has 12GB of RAM. I must have put a spare in it for safe keeping at one point because I wouldn't have bothered to do that intentionally. Even with it's 2012 era mobile focused CPU, there doesn't seem to be any issue running software like VScodium.

What I have now is a fully functional machine with every piece of software I need running perfectly. It's even got a 3.5mm analog audio input, which just last week I was pissed off at my modern day laptop for lacking. Not to mention, the keyboard on it kicks major ass. The keys have just the right travel, and it's almost silent compared to every other laptop I have.

My next project is a 2015 era HP laptop with 4GB of RAM and a Celeron. It ran Windows 10 like shit from the moment I got it. Why pre-install an OS on something that can't run it? I bought it due to an emergency, otherwise I'd have been far more discerning. I just needed something to pay bills with. I'm not sure what to install on it. I have machines for virtually every OS I'd want to use, and of course there's WINE for when I'm not doing anything important. Why dual boot when I can repurpose e-waste? I don't know how I ended up with so many laptops, but here we are. This is a far cry from the first one I bought in 2010. That Laptop was an e-machine. It too had a celeron, but I believe it only had 2GB of RAM. It ran Windows 7, and for a time, I used it extensively. It was completely dead by 2012. It's hard drive lives on in a modded original Xbox my daughter uses to play Simpsons Hit & Run.

See, and that's the thing. Nothing is ever truly obsolete. I'll use a Palm TX to take notes for an NES game I'm playing on a 90's CRT while recording the gameplay on state of the art laptop. There's no reason to give up on old stuff if it can be made to serve a practical purpose today. I don't think about it while I'm doing it. Everything's a tool to get the "job" done. I'm not going to play NES on a modern display. The palm is literally designed to take notes and does it better than my phone. The laptop has a massive SSD in it, so I can record forever. That's tech from the 80's, 90's, 2000's, and 2020's working in tandem for me and it makes me happy. I know I could record the same footage from an emulator and use notepad for notes. I suppose I would if I didn't have the means to use the setup I have. More likely, I wouldn't bother at all to do any of it.

All of this Anti-AI crusading has made me curious. AI sure as hell isn't making money, so what keeps something like Meta or Microsoft from dying once they pump all of their money into technology that'll never go anywhere in it's current state?

The answer is telemetry for the purpose of targeted advertising. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and many others gather your personal information and sell it to advertisers. It's all legal, and it's a huge business. In fact, the entire tech industry is more or less built upon it. How else could Meta afford to buy up all it's competition? Your personal data is a valuable asset that is being harvested and sold for profit.

If this paradigm we find ourselves in disgusts you like it does me, you can change things. I'm not actively telling you to do any of these things, but this is what I do. There's certainly more, but this is enough to start with. A part two would boil down to "throw all of your crap out and buy a rotary phone". Nobody's going to do that, so here's Protecting Yourself Without Being a Kook About it. It's not definitive, but it works well for me. I feel much better about my relationship with technology and I get better, more functional software to boot.

Hey, cops, get a load of this! While it's been pretty well established that AI is completely useless doing office work, we still have stupid people pretending or perhaps even believing that AI can create art. If you're one of these stupid people then I implore you not to procreate. Wait, I don't even need to worry about that.

I tried to use ChatGPT to make art. It looked like shit. Read about this profoundly unique experience here.

Sorry, philly police dept. If it's any consolation, it's nothing personal. In fact, the only thing I know about Philly is that Tom Hanks died of AIDS there in that one movie. I don't remember the name of it.

Police in philly are getting hot and bothered over social media posts that talk shit about AI. Frankly, if your product is so bad that the police need to get involved, something is seriously wrong. If you've got credible evidence that people are concerned enough about Data Centers that you need to form an anti-terrorism task force, perhaps the police should look at why. Rather than blame citizens for trying to protect the communities they live in, ban the data centers and avoid the problem entirely.

As far as I'm concerned, data centers have no place in America. The don't add anything of value to our lives and they hurt the communities they're built in. However, I'm not in charge, and my power is limited to my vote. I don't think burning them down will help. In fact, violence will discredit the anti AI movement. Instead, we need to wipe this technology off the face of the planet in the only way these scumbags understand: by pulling our money out. Do not use Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other companies products if they use or perpetuate AI. I know I just posted a youtube video ten days ago. Maybe I should give that up.

I specifically stopped using Windows because of Co-Pilot and just recently de-googled my phone. There's no adjustment needed in switching to Linux and Graphene OS. You can install Linux Mint on anything made this century and it'll run near flawlessly. You don't need Youtube, and you don't need any of the other crap Google peddles. Especially if they're going to harm our communities with these data centers.

I'm preaching to the choir here, though. The First Ammendement is not up for debate, and nobody, anywhere, has the right to stifle your speech or mine. There's no need to make threats, because the majority believes AI sucks and it's perfectly feasible to make that happen without violence. It's only natural that police would have trouble understanding that there are non-violent means to reaching goals. To waste tax dollars tracking people who are fighting the digital equivelent of cigarettes is stupid, but whatever.

I mentioned an "anti-AI" movement earlier. The fact is, that doesn't exist. If you're alive in America right now, you're probably anti-AI. Out of the hundreds of people I know, only three of them are what I'd consider "pro-AI". All of them are kind of stupid. You know, the types that hop on to any bandwagon they see without thinking critically about it. The "I think NFTs are cool" kind of people. I don't give them much thought because they're idiots. I suspect that if this becomes a nationwide thing, it'll be way to difficult to track in any meaningful way. And if they use an AI to do it, it'll probably screw up so does it really matter in the end? No.

Youtube sucks now, and it's primarily the interfaces fault. The site seems to recommend high production value, TV-esque nonsense over actual people. Despite that, it's the only Google product I still use. Gemini has made search unusable, and lol at the idea of using something like Gmail for anything other than a throwaway. I used to use their cloud service until I realized it was idiotic to pay a company that makes it's money off of stealing data to store my data.

Still, I like the idea of Youtube. The fact that I can upload a video of myself playing an NES game is pretty cool. I don't know if I'll actually continue doing it, but we'll see. I've got one more in the pipeline after this. I still need to watch it myself before I release it to the public.

See, I don't actually care if this thing looks or sounds that great. Old Youtube didn't, and people enjoyed it just fine. Not to mention, NES games look better this way if you ask me.